How to Hide from a Drone
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Most militaries also have access to some high orbit satellites that have 24x7 coverage of an area, and then some low orbit satellites which fly overhead every few hours and can grab high res shots. The combination makes it very hard to sneak a secret plane from one building to another between orbits, since the 24/7 coverage will see it (albeit at lower res).
I'm pretty sure "no" militaries have 24/7 coverage of any area on the planet.
b) that IR LED would have to be extremely powerful to overwhelm a camera that is looking at a larger area
But, maybe you could find a different flaw in the exposure control. If not, you'll just have to be really bright.
> How to hide from a drone?
"Shine bright IR flashlights at it in a 100m radius around your position"
Get the feeling if someone was dropping 100yr old mortars on you this still isn't a viable option.
I try my best not to get personal but this is so fucking dumb that it almost feels like malicious advice for the current hot warzones that exist right now.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AColla...
So I'm fairly certain this is what most drone operators will see on the screen. This video is over 13 years old though, so current optics are probably much more advanced than what was deployed in iraq. Near-future drones can also probably use 5G networks to transmit higher resolution videos. I don't think anyone can hide from this, even if they don't have anything to hide. False positives seem extremely likely and if the domestic drones won't shoot, they still will very likely be reporting a lot of crimes and violations that didn't actually happen. The guy in the video who the operators claimed was carrying an AK-47 that was also an RPG, was actually a reporter carrying a camera and laptop.
Today police drones could look at your backyard from a few dozen meters, and the same qualified immunity that let them execute people in the streets would prevent you to do anything against them; those drones wouldn't even need to hide themselves.
ps. Upvoted because I noticed you were downvoted, probably by a flesh drone programmed to quench any reference to Wikileaks and the Assange cause, without whom that video would never become public.
In the 80s, 30+ years ago, license plates were discernible from orbit. I often wonder, what if you had two distinct lenses, each with separate transmit?
EG, both operating at once. Or multiple lenses?
Now you could do things, potentially, such as use a high-fidelity lens to tag individuals. EG, license plates. Facial recognition. That sort of thing.
Once tagged, another lens, one which records the entire surface of the continental US, would track objects the size of vehicles, or even people. Determining who or what each was, would not be vital. Only high probability tracking, and those other lenses coming into play for closer viewing, to tag.
Now you're just tracking dots as they move. And once someone is tagged (phone, or license plate), they don't need to be retagged.
If not already being done, it won't be long until it is done. And once tagged, you'd never shake that tag easily.
We're all familiar with facial recognition tech used by SV giants, and we know of many things, such as gait recognition used in China. Yet what amount of tagging, facial recognition could be done, when budget was of absolutely zero concern. If computing power was of zero concern.
All you need at the images from the satellite. Ground based computing power can do the rest.
What if you had trillions in computing power to throw at this?
Well. Regardless. If it isn't a problem now, it will be a problem eventually.
https://www.ai.ch/politik/landsgemeinde
In the old days, every voter was given a special sword, and admission to the gathering was conditioned upon possession of the sword (my former landlord still has his, it might still be a requirement).
Would it be possible to develop some sort of equivalent, but as an antenna rather than a sword, reflecting on wavelengths illuminatable from the ground and observable from the air, that would allow popular votes to be taken via spy imagery? Presumably confirmation would involve multiple independent drone captures...
Gary Powers was shot down in 1960.
This is absolutely false.
It was also known by the likes of William Safire that our satellites could "read the license plates on the cars of Kremlin officials."
--
If untrue, please provide a counter source to many of the like statements as cited above. (You may be right, but it seems that many believe you are wrong)
Under 'twenty questions', second column, end of column, under highlights "Big Bird" satellite.
Again, you may be right. However there are many claims that this capability existed in the 80s.
Suggest you research some of the satellites of the time, including ones which worked on film, and jettisoned rolls of it for terrestrial pickup.
I wouldn't be surprised if they could do that but there was no proof around to demonstrate it. The military tend to be very secretive about what they can do because by revealing it they would implicitly give hints on what they cannot do.
Suggest you do the same.
Here's the "Big Bird" satellite you referred to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
> The cameras could scan contiguous areas up to 120 degrees wide, and achieved a ground resolution better than 2 ft (0.61 m) during the later phase of the project.
The sources you cite are, to put it nicely, propaganda. The physics simply doesn't agree that this was even remotely possible at the time.
Another commenter correctly pointed out that these claims would violate the diffraction limit by more than an order of magnitude, and that's assuming zero atmospheric interference, which is absolutely not the case.
Why do you think film is relevant here? These satellites are not noise-limited like your phone vs. an SLR, they're diffraction limited. This is an optical resolution limit that has nothing to do with the photon capture medium or the size of the photographic plate. The only way to do better is to increase the effective area (of the mirror, not the plate) or to decrease the effective wavelength.
They were not doing interferometry with these satellites, and certainly not the multi-axis interferometry you'd need to be able to resolve centimeter-thick lines in text.
Yet this comment was refuted, and you have not addressed that fully.
> Why do you think film is relevant here?
As per the timeline, my comment with the film reference was written prior to any discussion about noise, or diffraction.
It was simply there to demonstrate the lengths gone, 2 decades prior to the 80s, in the 60s, to get imagery back to Earth.
I was curious how they did it in the early days, as video transmission technology was nascent. It quite certainly would have been a potential massive blocker on quality, from satellite to surface. Film seemed to solve that aspect of things in those early days.
I found this highly interesting. Film, from multiple lenses, the ultimate sneaker net (yes, it's analog, but still...)
Anyhow, over the years I've seen so many technical issues overcome, with sideways attacks on the problem. When people start saying "But... impossible!", I tend to have a high degree of skepticism.
I will say this though. Yes, it certainly could have been propaganda.
Doesn't mean it was, but I certainly do agree the potential is there.
I'll say two things here.
First, I'll still say "post film manipulation and processing may have enhanced imagery, and they were constantly modifying this gear from what I've read in that PDF."
Second, "Big Bird" was decommissioned in the mid 80s.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3662/1
There's no way it wasn't replaced with something else. What was that?
An example, is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen system, which wikipedia says was launched in the 70s, has multiple iterations, and is still being used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen#Imaging_sensors_a...
Shows some of these versions, and blockIII seems to have very nice resolution. Launched in 92, supposedly.
And yet, as these all of the programs? I doubt it. For example "Big Bird" (KH-9) and KH-11 were used in parallel. I bet others existed too.
I'm going to say that throwing out "No, it couldn't be done" in the 80s is hard for me to believe. Was it done?
Well if not, it was very close to the 80s, as in the very early 90s.
l = 1.22 * λ * L / D
Where λ is wavelength, L is distance and D is optical element diameter.
For satellite at an altitude of 150 km with 2.4 m diameter mirror and 0.4 μm blue light, this gives a spatial resolution of 0.3 m. To read a number plate requires an order of magnitude better than this.
To anyone reading this:
Pages 100 onward, you get to see diagrams of how it was built, and pics of the retrieval system and info on methods.
Page 120 onward talks about that return unit in more detail.
Page 122 I found interesting, details about measures to prevent the return unit from falling into enemy hands.
Page 128 is a good summary image, with some details on the lower right.
Page 165 onward, especially 168 have actual shots. 168 looks better than the first Google Earth images, and you can easily make out and identify how many 'things' the enemy has.
Sadly I have no more time currently to read, and more sadly some details are still redacted. Understandable, when I ponder the nature of some of those redacted parts. EG, privacy, current contractors still employed, tech methods still used on newer gear, at time of declassification.
This information can be crosschecked against cell phone location data and could flag anyone travelling without a phone, or with the wrong phone, for further scrutiny.
It sounds like paranoid delusions now, but I think it's what we're moving towards in 50 years or so after society has normalized mass surveillance.
What is lacking is the fusion you mention. But with ubiquitous 5G it's only a matter of when, not if.
The smaller ones clipped onto the top of traffic lights look rather eyeborgian ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1043844/ )
https://www.baesystems.com/en-us/product/airborne-widearea-p...
Much of this is also available to private citizens on Google Maps too - my home is not visible from the street, so when we were buying it, we used the satellite imagery to determine how big a back yard it had, how much parking was available, roughly how big the decks were, and we could even see the previous owner's patio furniture.
I thought that was movie stuff, like in https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
I'm aware that this is difficult to prove, because secrecy, national security and so on, but license plates from orbit? In the 80ies?
That video is not taken from a drone at all. It's from an AH-64 Apache, a manned attack helicopter with a flight crew of two.
War is truly the worst thing there is.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278 on "authoritarian followers":
> "Authoritarian Aggression. When I say authoritarian followers are aggressive I don’t mean they stride into bars and start fights. First of all, high RWAs go to church enormously more often than they go to bars. Secondly, they usually avoid anything approaching a fair fight. Instead they aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. “Right” for them means, more than anything else, that their hostility is (in their minds) endorsed by established authority, or supports such authority. “Might” means they have a huge physical advantage over their target, in weaponry say, or in numbers, as in a lynch mob."
on a lighter note:
> "Believe it or not, researchers are not allowed to organize murderous mobs to study hostility. So we have to study authoritarian aggression in subtler ways."
Not entirely true: Chelsea Manning was released in 2017.
After her sentence was commutated by Obama, otherwise she would be in prison until at least 2045.
She was recently placed back in jail for refusing to testify against Assange (instead referring the prosecution to her prior testimony), though she was released again after a year.
I wouldn't take a bet against her ending up back in jail for a similar attempt at intimidation once the sham court in the UK sends Assange to the US to be executed for distributing the above video to the world.
Anyway, holding the soldiers accountable won't actually fix the problem. I think what happened here is the natural outcome of conditions created well before that group of soldiers arrived in the scene.
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuPX8mjeb-E (IIUC the song backing this patriotic video was, as composed in the 1980s, anti-war)
From memory there were two helicopters?
The next best way is to use RF to triangulate their C2 location and either jam it or destroy it.
"Hide." Kids today, no valour.
That doesn't do jack when the drone is autonomous.
Paying attention doesn't do much. If the government wants to pass something, especially in the name of national security, it will get passed.
I'm so tired of this kind of useless cynicism. Voting matters, especially at the local level. You can get involved in your party at local levels, too. How do you think all these politicians get into the political class to begin with, in free societies?
Or should we overthrow our democratically elected government, because you believe cynically there's no point in voting, they're going to do whatever they want anyway, and install a dictatorship or Party and hope that we get a benevolent one?
Or are you suggesting that the Socialist Utopia is right around the bend, if we all just give up on voting and... I don't know, what's the point of your comment?
Here’s my current theory...
I think people want to be seen as virtuous. Stuff is bad. People want positive change. Either they don’t know what to do or making change is too hard. So they say that change is impossible.
Based on the really high rates of obesity, I think more people know what to do, but it’s hard, and they don’t do it. I know what I should do (eat less, exercise) but I don’t.
I vote in every election I can, national to local. But ultimately you have to understand that in most cases, unless you're willing to dedicate your life to political advocacy (an exhausting route filled with small corruptions, traps of necessity that threaten your principals, and unpleasant people) you're choosing to adjust the angle of the rudder within a certain margin, not the trajectory or shape of the ship.
But my point is that voting isn't everything - the government can do whatever they want in the name of national security. Which is an obvious problem, but something that they can scare monger people into agreeing with.
So no, zero faith for things like laws to keep the government in check.
A quote: “We came, we saw, he died!” she exclaimed."
- Hillary on the murder of Colonel Qaddafi
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/libya-isis-hi...
(A NYT sourced article, just for you)
On one hand, that’s an interesting discussion about modern warfare. On the other it is not a convincing argument about how you shouldn’t be too worried about the US military, because while a guérilla campaign might be able to stop them, it would only work after getting hundreds of thousands of people killed in your country. Not exactly a comforting argument.
Is this supposed to be a good thing for the defender? The us has been there for more than a decade and the defenders weren't running out of combatants.
Yes, there is. It was called the Russian WWII front where the Russians sent to the meat grinder by the tens of thousands held back the German army until winter and supply issues decimated them. It is a viable strategy to deal with a lack of equipment.
Whether or on it is acceptable to say on HN is another story.
Which is literally the very definition of _good_ -
"In most contexts, the concept of good denotes the conduct that should be preferred when posed with a choice between possible actions"
Another argument is that the US military is likely to be split in case of direct intervention on US national soil, including in support of the National Guard or local PD. Same goes for the National Guard or local PD - ACANB [All Cops Are Not Bastards]. Not to mention the +350 millions firearms (and associated ammunitions & gears) owned by Americans.
See also training facilities in for instance Fort Polk, or the german Schnöggersburg, where that is only the largest, but not the only one.
Also things like https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/7/29/d... come to mind.
Could someone explain how a GPS receiver (especially one which doesn't utilize DGPS of any sorts) would have any sort of digital signature which could be measured from a drone?
https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/702902#specs: CONNECTIVITY Bluetooth®, ANT+®, Wi-Fi®.
From Garmin website, featured items:
https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/711488: CONNECTIVITY Bluetooth®
https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/707174/pn/010-02427-02: CONNECTIVITY Bluetooth®, ANT+®
https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/713363: CONNECTIVITY Bluetooth®, ANT+®, Wi-Fi®
Older school hiking GPS:
https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/699779: WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY yes (Wi-Fi®, BLUETOOTH®, ANT+®)
The weighting scale apparently has no wifi, so that's drone safe. Though not quite portable.
Locating Noncooperative Radio Receivers Using Wideband Stimulated Emissions[2]
A Practical Superheterodyne-Receiver Detector Using Stimulated Emissions[3]
1. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6857348
Of course there is also the opinion that tv detector vans were a hoax and would never work, so ymmv :)
It would be a heck of a trick to detect a GPS receiver that way, though. Probably be easier just to listen for the RF noise from the switching regulator in the power supply.
Natural things give off very little RF... Pretty much anything electronic gives off far far more. It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility for a military to use antenna arrays to try to track every nearby electronic device of any kind. Sure - identifying the device might be tricky, but you gain a lot of intel simply knowing where electronic devices are clustering and headed.
"Did the author know very little about the subject, or does he know exactly what he has written?"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_detector_detectorhttps://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-10-15/drones...
"With the threat of drones omnipresent, officials, army personnel and even civilians have had to alter habits.
In Martuni (which Azerbaijanis call Khojavend), Avanesyan, the mayor, eschews what he considers a less secure but more modern smartphone in favor of a primitive Nokia, which would reveal less information to an adversary. Similarly, soldiers near the front line are proscribed from using GPS or taking any photos with their phones. Drivers tape up headlights or smear mud on their cars to obscure any markings that could make them a target. Gatherings are discouraged, with people urged not to spend too much time in one place and to designate an emergency shelter."
American https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW77hVqux10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsKbGc9TUHc
The approaches in this article seem like they would be quickly developed around. The visual cues only work temporarily until the software gets retrained and it’s dangerous to test if the drones are using updates to defeat the anti-AI t-shirts and whatnot.
Drones are pretty expensive (few thousand). So if they can be destroyed for $1, that’s probably the only way to really stop them.
Slingshots and shotguns are probably too easy to use and get away with it. But maybe some cheap drone, autonomous, that just flies into the expensive drones and crashes them.
Funny thing is, crossbows and bows in general are not :) Maybe because they are larger and difficult to carry concealed.
Had much fun with a slingshot(without arm rest) as a kid, using steel balls out of old ball bearings and glass marbles at distances up to about 50 meters with very surprising results against brick and concrete walls. Made large parts of them simply chip off, or deep dents into trash bins, traffic signs, and similar things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1VdhQbfSTY&feature=youtu.be
Seems pretty effective on the ground, but the drone footage shows what they're actually up to.